Well I can't disagree with that...but I think most people are guilty of other players friendliness, if you can call it guilt. I think your reputation in the past and your position of "power" in the present provide you with this benefit on the regular.

I've been chewing this over for a little bit now and here's what I've come up with.

Originally when I played Rome which was essentially when I created Rhye and this forum account (Summer 2010 or so) the game was very different and I played very differently. Of course I could talk about many aspects that changed, but for the purpose of focusing on this discussion (which is what I aim to do) I'll talk about "Eliminate the personal." Back in the day, that was quite a common phrase, I believe Soundboy uses it on his Guide to Rome II on the wiki. And I think although I myself have grown as a player, it was also the development of Rome II from a grind to win the marathons to positional early and mid-game play in order to win (the marathon tactics are essentially the same however the game time limit function made it so that marathons were basically stalled out and players were content to have those games be thrown out rather than actually to drive the game to a conclusion.) "Eliminate the personal" becomes easier when you're playing maps that are more card-heavy than income-heavy because there's always a solid justification for making a kill versus just hitting someone. At least I psychologically felt that that was justification for making a play which would hurt my pals. Maybe it's because there are no shades of grey; when I hit you have the option of hitting one of your continents, hitting two of them, or hitting all three of them. Perhaps one continent hit would just bother you because it was insignificant to the game but there was a sort of malicious intent, that is to say you were bothered that you were hit and that I was no better off for it. Perhaps hitting two continents would leave you strong enough to retaliate, but overall too weakened, and perhaps hitting three continents would cripple you far too much. Maybe the exact answer is to hit 2.5 continents, but it isn't possible. Perhaps you hit one continent while your friends thought you should have hit two, and now you've gone and pissed off more people. (A game-recording function could really clean up the debates here though.) Fully killing a player just seems like more of a concrete decision, and thus I feel more detached from it.

It would be an interesting study to see how Classicists, Romans, and Bioheads feel about the "Eliminate the personal" idea to see if other people feel like killing is more proper than making your opponent suffer (putting them out of their misery maybe) even if both moves are of the same quality.

To tie this back into the original topic (which I think I've strayed a bit too far from) is my thought that in these income-heavy games where we'd feel guilt about potentially ruining our friends' games, and so we'd hesitate to make these moves towards our friends. Can we blame the game and not the players?

When it comes to hitting another player in order to weaken them I don't think I am less likely to hit a friend/well-known opponent over a player that I don't know. I hit a player if it makes sense to me to do so, not based on who they are. If anything I am more likely to hit a player that I know( just ask GK- Hah!) solely because they will be more understanding. If you are scared to hit certain players because they might not like you then you are trying to make the wrong friends and you are too much of a hippy for a war game!

In bio I still use this strategy even though players end up halfkilling with their 'bomb' plays- I'm not even going to call that a strategy. Which is probably why my win % sucks at bio.

In rome when I hit a player I find that my reputation in the chatroom affects how likely a player is to retaliate. If you are not acknowledged as an established nation then you are more likely to get hit in order to be taught a lesson and used as a demonstrational tool to show why the other players shouldn't attack the retaliating player. Rome reminds me of Imperialism era Europe where the different nations are all strutting around seeing who has the biggest feather attached to them. I find that players are more likely to retaliate if they feel that they have to protect their status as a powerful nation not to be crossed than for precise calculated regions.

If I have the game won and can choose who to kill first I kill turtles, submissive players, suiciders, shit talkers and people who aren't playing to win first. If both players did equally well then I kill the player I don't know as well first as a sign of respect.